Rolling to “A-Free-Ka”: Seeing and Hearing the Transmedia Screen Worlds of Kahlil Joseph’s “Cheeba”

This chapter focuses on the screen text “Cheeba” (2010), one of Joseph’s earliest works hitherto neglected by media scholarship. By examining the transatlantic flows nuancing the aesthetics of “Cheeba” alongside the diasporic undercurrents that shape Los Angeles’s overlapping film and music scenes, the chapter draws out the screen text’s sophisticated relationships with the African continent, exploring how the project constructs in both audial and visual terms “A-Free- Ka,” a fundamental concept underpinning the musical work of Joseph’s collaborator Shafiq Husayn.